Relying on her own valor and fortitude, and her willingness to face death without flinching, Jiang Xiaoyi had finally managed to defuse the crisis.

However, she had paid a heavy price for it—

Not long after seeing off Mother Jiang and the relatives, Jiang Xiaoyi rushed to the bathroom.

After several rounds of vomiting and diarrhea, Jiang Xiaoyi felt like even her walking had gone unsteady, as if she were drifting.

Weak and full of grief and indignation, she accused Ye Zhen: “Did you do that on purpose? Fine, you put in soy sauce, but why did you also have to put in mustard?”

This time, Ye Zhen finally stopped being so self-righteous about it. The man looked somewhat guilty and ashamed, and he stammered out an explanation: “I followed what I learned before—heated the pan, added oil. Who knew that once I threw in the asparagus, the flames shot up so high? I panicked a little, and I thought I should pour something in to put out the fire. There happened to be soy sauce right there, so I grabbed it and poured it in…”

Jiang Xiaoyi was practically furious to death: “Ye Zhen, do you have any common sense at all? Even if a stir-fry catches fire, the correct way to put it out is to cover the pan with its lid! Not to pour water or soy sauce or some other random liquid on it!”

For once, Ye Zhen showed something like an attitude of admitting guilt. He glanced at Jiang Xiaoyi, lowered his head, and mumbled, “I was too nervous at the time. I forgot.”

Jiang Xiaoyi couldn’t help but let out a soul-deep interrogation: “Aren’t you supposed to be a man who’s capable at everything he does? How did you get so nervous just stir-frying a dish? Weren’t you the one who could be both a great boss and a great assistant, competent at every job?”

Ye Zhen mumbled in a muffled voice: “I’ve now come to realize my own shortcomings.”

“Fine, you’ve explained why you put in so much soy sauce. What about the mustard? Go on, explain the mustard to me.”

Ye Zhen’s answer was rather inspired. The man pressed his lips together: “Because I’d put in so much soy sauce, I noticed the color had turned very black, and the asparagus had lost all its green—it looked quite unappetizing. I saw there happened to be mustard right there, and I thought, since mustard is so green, if I put a little in and stir-fried it, maybe it could neutralize the blackness of the soy sauce and make the asparagus look green and glossy again…”

“…”

Jiang Xiaoyi was left utterly speechless. She’d wanted to curse Ye Zhen out some more, but unfortunately her stomach started hurting again.

By the time she came out of the bathroom again, supporting her lower back with one hand, Jiang Xiaoyi’s first instinct was to ask for leave. But the moment she opened the OA online office system, Ye Zhen’s words snuffed out that thought.

“You can’t take leave tomorrow. There’s an investment decision meeting at ten thirty in the morning; a lunch banquet arranged at noon with a representative from an investment firm; a project signing ceremony at one thirty in the afternoon that requires you to appear on camera; a government reception and site visit at three thirty; a news interview at six thirty; and two separate dinner engagements at seven and eight…”

Faced with this jam-packed schedule, Jiang Xiaoyi simply wanted to cry.

In the past, if she’d been just a lowly employee, she wouldn’t have cared about anything—if her body couldn’t hold up, she’d just take leave. If Li You’ai didn’t approve it, she could force the issue too; after all, the hospital could issue a proper sick note, and the workplace wouldn’t fall apart without any one person…

But now—now that she’d unexpectedly become Director Jiang, she found herself even less free to do as she pleased.

Especially since she couldn’t even take leave. When Jiang Xiaoyi opened the OA and looked at the pile of documents waiting for her approval, many of them marked urgent, she truly felt tears were about to fall.

In the past, even working overtime, there’d still been free time after clocking out. Now it was twenty-four-hour standby.

All the company’s big and small affairs were waiting on Jiang Xiaoyi to grant authorization and make decisions.

Pulling out her phone, a pile of missed calls only made Jiang Xiaoyi feel even more anxious and on edge.

“Even though it’s my fault the cooking turned out like that, being a boss really isn’t that easy either.” Ye Zhen’s gaze looked a little unnatural. He rummaged around for a while, then handed Jiang Xiaoyi something. “Stomach medicine. Eat it.”

Under Jiang Xiaoyi’s puzzled gaze, Ye Zhen coughed and added, “Don’t worry, it’s over-the-counter, very effective. I used to… after I had no choice but to eat the food I made myself, this is also what cured me…”

“You’ve actually cooked for yourself before? Then you should know it can kill people, right? Aren’t you supposed to claim you’re good at everything else? Why are you so bad at cooking?”

Ye Zhen looked away, but still struggled to defend himself: “Cooking is just a form of menial labor. I used to be, after all, a corporate heir—I didn’t have that much time to waste. For me, cooking my own meals wasn’t an economical use of time, but that doesn’t mean I’m bad at it. I just never had the time to learn. If I studied it seriously, I definitely wouldn’t be lacking.”

Jiang Xiaoyi was livid: “Well, you’re not President Ye anymore now, you’re Little Ye, and I’ve even hired you a teacher to learn from! Have you learned anything?!”

Faced with the accusation, Ye Zhen’s voice also went a little weak, but he still forced himself to sound composed as he explained: “I do want to learn here too, but work every day is too exhausting. They all just call me the odd-jobs guy—it looks like I’m not doing anything, but it’s actually really tiring. No one ever dared to talk to me like this before. Now not only can you yell at me like this, even Li You’ai can too. I’ve never suffered this kind of abuse before—I need mental adjustment. On top of that, I have to keep up with working out when I get home—it’s already drained me completely. I don’t have time to learn anything else…”

“Now you know how tiring it is for us working folk, huh?! People like you who play boss should get a good beating like this every now and then! Every day you’re all wailing at us to use our free time to improve ourselves, to hold ourselves to high standards in our spare time—now it’s your turn, and look at you! You didn’t even try, you just lay flat right away! Aching here, hurting there—you’ve just been spoiled by having too much money.”

Jiang Xiaoyi hadn’t meant to keep going, but once she started, righteous fury took over: “When I used to be your assistant, was there ever a day I didn’t cook my own meals? Does working hard for a day mean you get to eat out every single day? Now you’re leaning on this big tree that is me, living in my mansion, using my domestic help—you don’t have to do anything, and you’re still this exhausted.”

“Back then I had to buy my own groceries, cook my own meals, and after eating, wash the dishes and clean the kitchen too, and the next day I still had to rush to catch the subway and bus to work. Did I say I was tired? Are you working harder or better than I was? You don’t even have the basic quality, stamina, and endurance to be a working person, and you still dare to brag about how great you are at working? At the end of the day, isn’t it just that you were born into the right family?”

Ye Zhen stubbornly retorted: “I admit it, I was indeed born with a good hand, ahead at the starting line—but that’s not my fault. Now that I’ve just started working, my form isn’t quite polished yet, but I’ll definitely get more and more used to it…”

The man stiffened his neck and said, “I’ll take responsibility for my cooking too. There are some things that require you personally that I can’t do in your place, but as compensation, I can review the other documents for you.”

Jiang Xiaoyi’s stomach had actually settled quite a bit by now, and Ye Zhen’s attitude of admitting fault was pretty good too, but what use was that!

Jiang Xiaoyi looked despairingly at the pending approval documents in the OA: “Impossible. Even if you help me, you won’t finish reviewing them in time! This isn’t humanly possible! Look at this—every cooperation agreement is at least forty or fifty pages, and a lot of them are even directly in English! Even if I were in great shape tonight and hadn’t eaten your poisonous asparagus, and didn’t eat or drink at all, I still couldn’t finish reading them!”

“I can finish them.” Ye Zhen cleared his throat. “Even though I really am garbage at cooking, at work, I’m still quite capable.”

The man’s face was indeed full of confidence. He booted up the computer on the spot and had Jiang Xiaoyi log into her account: “The honey water on the desk is good for your stomach—drink it. I’m going to work.”

Ten minutes later, a notification popped up on Jiang Xiaoyi’s phone—Ye Zhen had already finished reviewing a thirty-page English contract on the computer.

“Ye Zhen, you’re not just messing around to spite me, are you? You can’t rubber-stamp things just to save face in front of me!”

Facing Jiang Xiaoyi’s accusation, Ye Zhen was quite composed: “I’m not messing around. My English is at native-speaker level.”

“Even at native level, there’s no way you could finish a thirty-page contract in ten minutes!”

“Contracts like this are all templates—you don’t need to read every single word carefully.” Ye Zhen pulled up the contract he’d just finished reviewing. “Look, first, these clauses about mutual friendship and reciprocity and common agreement—all just filler, no need to read them. And this entire page here is definitions of technical terms—also no need to read, because by the time a contract reaches you, the legal department and the business department will already have reviewed it. The most basic clauses like this won’t have problems.”

Ye Zhen glanced at Jiang Xiaoyi. “In theory, a sufficiently reliable legal and business department can control the overall risk of the contract, but you really can’t blindly trust them either.”

Ye Zhen paused, then continued: “I used to think my legal staff’s skills were simply too poor—I changed teams several times, raised their salaries several times too. But now I know I was wrong. Now that I’ve worked as an employee myself, I understand why their reviews are always careless: because they’re just employees. They don’t genuinely worry, from the heart, whether some tiny clause might cause a loss for the company. They just draw their fixed salary and don’t truly care about the company’s future. So as the boss, you still can’t fully hand things off to them. What you need to look at are the core clauses: the rights and obligations of both parties, the breach-of-contract liability—these are the crux of the contract. Once you’ve checked those, if there’s no major problem, it can be signed.”

As Ye Zhen spoke, he kept reviewing and clearing several simple documents in a row: “I looked at your review history and the annotations you’ve made—you really are conscientious about everything, so conscientious you even correct typos in the contracts. But actually, a typo doesn’t affect a contract’s validity or interpretation. As a manager, you can’t handle everything personally. You can’t fully trust your subordinates, but you also can’t fully doubt them either. You have to learn to delegate—that’s the art of management. You might be a good boss when it comes to details, but on the macro level, this approach just won’t work at all.”

“But some things just can’t be delegated!” Jiang Xiaoyi protested. She pointed at a document Ye Zhen hadn’t reviewed yet. “Take this procurement contract for example—it’s obvious the raw materials being procured are priced a bit above market rate, and it’s a contract that old fox Director Miao pushed through. There’s definitely something fishy about the pricing, some hidden agenda. Odds are he’s taking kickbacks! Back when you were still President Ye, if this had been submitted to you, you probably would’ve approved it without even looking. All these executives have been embezzling money, haven’t they? They’ve just been fooling you because you don’t understand market prices!”

Ye Zhen’s beautiful dark eyes turned, and he let out a soft laugh: “Of course I know the market prices.”

“You think being a boss just requires being born lucky?” Ye Zhen pressed his lips together. “Of course I know about the little tricks in these executives’ contracts. But water that’s too clear holds no fish—if you crack down on all these executives’ little schemes, they’ll lose all their passion for work.”

“I’ve always known Director Miao takes kickbacks, but the amount he takes isn’t large—it hasn’t affected the company’s normal operations. In this contract, Director Miao also didn’t go for a low-quality partner just because he’s taking a cut. On the whole, the contract is fairly fair and favorable to us at Ruiyi. That indicates that, broadly speaking, Director Miao has still kept this deal well under control.”

“This is quite different from the overseas industrial park project he tried to push through last time. That project—his ambitions were too big, he overstepped his authority too much, and it had to be stopped and firmly warned against and suppressed. But this contract is just small fry. You turn a blind eye to it, and it benefits both sides.”

Jiang Xiaoyi was practically speechless: “Letting him take kickbacks—that has benefits too? Isn’t that a drain on company assets?”

“There is a benefit,” Ye Zhen said with a smile. “Director Miao knows that while working at Ruiyi, though he can’t get big money like the overseas industrial park deal, he can still scoop up a decent amount of small favors from minor contracts. So he’ll want to keep working here at Ruiyi. And to cover up the fact that he’s taking kickbacks, he’ll also work hard to produce results in negotiations, to win the boss’s trust so he can keep skimming further down the line. Even though his motives for doing this aren’t good, what’s the result? The result is that he stays steadily employed at Ruiyi, and he’s still able to make good use of his professional knowledge and experience to negotiate deals that are quite good on the whole.”

“For a manager, behavior like his isn’t entirely bad either—as long as you know clearly in your heart where he’s taking his cut, you hold his weakness in your hand. You lose a small amount of money, but you get to control the executive. Once his ambitions grow in the future and threaten you and the company, you can use the evidence of his kickbacks to send him to prison. Do you think he’d still dare to fight you to the death then?”

Jiang Xiaoyi had never been able to tolerate the slightest impropriety. Back when she was just a low-level employee, she’d always been indignant about people like Director Miao skimming off the company. She’d always assumed it was because senior executives like Ye Zhen didn’t understand the situation and were being deceived. Only now did she realize that as a manager, Ye Zhen had entirely different considerations.

“I honestly couldn’t be bothered explaining all this to you, but given today’s cooking mishap, I’ll reluctantly give you a lecture as compensation.”

As Ye Zhen spoke, his hands never stopped moving, continuing to open new documents for approval in the OA: “Being an employee might not be easy, but don’t think being a boss is simple either.”

“This kind of tedious management knowledge—how to work people, how to navigate interpersonal relationships—do you think I was born knowing it?” The man grew more and more didactic the more he talked. “My whole knowledge structure is built on this stuff. You want me to set that aside for cooking? You think that’s a fitting use of my talent? It’s completely wrong for me—I really shouldn’t have tried to learn cooking at all, it’s a waste of my gifts.”

“Employees can still be willful—quit if you want to quit. A boss can’t do that. Do you think being a boss was ever easy for me before? Now that you’ve become Director Jiang, you know how capable I used to be, right? I would never pile up pending approvals in the OA like you—my work efficiency is far better than yours.”

Much as she didn’t want to admit it, what Ye Zhen said was, in fact, an undeniable truth.

Jiang Xiaoyi was just about to defend herself when her phone rang. It was a call from Director Li.

“Director Jiang, about the new project I brought up to you last week—the person in charge on the other side has suddenly moved up the schedule and wants to meet tonight. Do you have time?”

Jiang Xiaoyi had an impression of this new project—she’d originally wanted to handle it personally, but given her physical condition tonight, there was no way she could go. She immediately said, “I have other plans tonight, so I’ll leave it to you, Director Li.”

After hanging up the phone, Jiang Xiaoyi didn’t think much of it, but Ye Zhen stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her as if lodging a complaint: “A new project? You’re just letting Director Li handle it alone?”

What was wrong with that?

“I’m in no condition to go negotiate right now,” Jiang Xiaoyi said, feeling a bit wronged. “Besides, didn’t you just say I should learn to delegate?”

Ye Zhen rubbed his temples, looking somewhat helpless: “Learning to delegate doesn’t mean giving the other party too much freedom either. Don’t you know that for this kind of project, you always need an A-role and a B-role? Director Li discovered the new project, so he can be the A-role, but you must assign another director to check him as the B-role—never let any one person control every point of contact for a project.”

“With two people together, they can supervise each other. In particular, you should pair Director Li with a director he’s not especially close to, so they check each other. Even if Director Li wants to skim money off this project, having another party present will limit how much he can take. As a manager, you must always prevent resources from becoming overly concentrated in one senior executive’s hands after you delegate.”

“You don’t have time for this new project, so if you hand it entirely over to Director Li like this, all future matters and information regarding the project will only be known to him—you’ll only ever hear his side of the story. If that old fox Director Li ever jumps ship in the future, he could take this whole project with him, roots and all. But if you assign a B-role to check him, at least you’ll be able to hear both sides and stay clear-eyed about what’s happening with the project. If Director Li ever tries to poach clients away in the future, you’ll still have another executive who can take over contact with the project, and we’ll be perfectly able to keep it in-house with better terms in time.”

How enlightening!

Jiang Xiaoyi nodded repeatedly, immediately pulling out her phone: “Then I’ll arrange for Director Miao to go with Director Li on this project right away!”

Though Jiang Xiaoyi’s response could be considered promising, Ye Zhen still couldn’t help but let out a look of despair. He sighed, “I have a feeling you might be Ruiyi’s own doom—this company is going to fall apart in your hands.”

The man glanced at Jiang Xiaoyi and, infuriatingly, drew a further conclusion: “With management skills like yours, you’re definitely going to mismanage your future boyfriend too.”

“?”

“Managing subordinates and managing a man are basically the same thing—you have to give a man a certain amount of space, but you also have to keep an iron grip on his financial lifeline and his whereabouts. Confiscate his cards, hand him a little pocket money now and then to keep him satisfied. Quietly plant eyes around him too, form alliances, unite every force you can unite—in short, don’t give a man too much room to run wild. Human nature is inherently cheap, just like with these executives—you need to whip him into line every once in a while.”

At this point, Ye Zhen wore a disdainful expression: “Remember this lesson of mine today—even if you drive Ruiyi into bankruptcy someday, at least you’ll be able to fall back on this trick to keep a man in check.”

He smiled smugly: “I really am a master of corporate management.” Ye Zhen said, glancing down at his watch. “At my work efficiency and skill level, I’ll have every single pending document in the OA cleared in two hours. No comparison, no harm—now you know just how precious talented people like me are, right?”

Jiang Xiaoyi was genuinely impressed this time, nodding along repeatedly.

Ye Zhen cleared his throat: “So?”

So what?

The man glanced at Jiang Xiaoyi: “By convention, shouldn’t you say something at a time like this?” Ye Zhen cleared his throat. “I’m not asking you to say anything insincere or exaggerated—just say what you truly feel inside right now.”

Oh, oh, oh!

Jiang Xiaoyi suddenly understood!

So he wanted her approval and praise!

“Ye Zhen, you really are excellent!”

Ye Zhen’s expression indeed finally looked a little better: “That’s it? That’s all?”

“You’re truly irreplaceable!”

The corner of Ye Zhen’s mouth lifted slightly: “Keep going.”

Jiang Xiaoyi decided to go with the flow and keep at it, and immediately, with genuine sincerity, spoke her true inner feelings: “I hope the excellent you can work for me for the rest of your life!”

“…”

Jiang Xiaoyi, you’re being a little too honest.